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Show Record loads on their ponies, sat there, 15 or 20 of them at a time, and came over. A couple of years later the rains and floods came and began cutting the bottoms more. That country is a sandstone country. The LaPlata is the top formation of that country between the base of the Chuckawala mountain and the mouth of Chinle Wash. On both sides of the river you have that fine drift sand. The heavy rain storms wash gutters 10 or 12 feet deep through it. The we have a dry season and the wind whips and blows the sand along the ground like frozen snow. It fills these little gulches and washes with that fine sand. Then a rain comes and washes that into the river and works the river plumb full of it. That helped to cut out the 598 bottoms more than anything else. I mean the channel has a tendency to fill with this sand. It has a tendency to throw the heavy body of the current against the banks. It undermines them and caves them in. It cuts in a half circle until it cuts the bottom entirely in two, and the next day it will go back into the old channel again. The waves tipped the cribbing that our ferry was anchored to and we had no more ferry boat, all went into the river. I have seen the bottom lands cut out on the river on the Colorado line to where the river enters the canyon at Chinle wash. I am familiar with the various branches and creeks that 599 run into the San Juan River. I am familiar with the head waters of the San Juan. There are no streams in the State of Utah that run into the San Juan throughout the year. The first stream going up the river on the north side that runs all year into the San Juan is the Animus. When we first went there we made roads. We broke a track through from Montezuma to Peter's Nipple, then across the desert country to the mouth of the Mancos River, passed Shiprock on the north side of the river up to Hogsback, and went up Canyon Largo and over to Santa Fe for freighting our supplies. In the summer time we went to Alamosa, Colorado. Canyon Largo is a large sand |